Nobody clicks past Google’s AI Overviews

a year ago by David Gerard to c/techtakes

Google claims the AI Overview on every search result — a frequently-wrong summary of other people’s work — sends a ton of clicks back to the original publishers they ripped off. This is false. Pew …

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HedyL 22 points a year ago

Most searchers don’t click on anything else if there’s an AI overview — only 8% click on any other search result. It’s 15% if there isn’t an AI summary.

I can't get over that. An oligopolistic company imposes a source on its users that is very likely either hallucinating or plagiarizing or both, and most people seem to eat it up (out of convenience or naiveté, I assume).

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zogwarg 17 points a year ago

Counter-theory: The now completely irrelevant search results and the idiotic summaries, are a one-two punch combo, that plunges the user in despair, and makes them close the browser out of disgust.

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dgerard 11 points a year ago

Convenience is king, and never mind accuracy.

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HedyL 10 points a year ago

If I'm not mistaken, even in pre-LLM days, Google had some kind of automated summaries which were sometimes wrong. Those bothered me less. The AI hallucinations appear to be on a whole new level of wrong (or is this just my personal belief - are there any statistics about this?).

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lettruthout 10 points a year ago

I usually scroll down just a little and find the source they trained on stole from. That one deserves a click most times because it explains the source.

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bitofhope 8 points a year ago

An alternative explanation for a lot of this is that people are seqrching for something that interests them, seeing that every result is spam or shopping and exiting the page.

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